The New American Conscience: A Short Study in Immorality, Part I

June 23, 2012

“Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter.” - So said Vice President Dick Cheney on camera during a Bush II Cabinet meeting. This meant that continuing deficit spending to justify attacking and occupying Iraq was just peachy keen. Borrow and spend trillions of dollars and find no WMDs found yet is dismaying to say the least. But those members of the “Axis of Evil” as Bush called them were fair game to do whatever it takes. Sounds sort of Biblical, doesn’t it? So no expense was too high the White House and the Pentagon jointly decided. Deficits really don’t matter.

So up went the National Debt another $4 Trillion! It only took 8 years. So who profited from the “Decider’s” self-righteous judgments which later led to wars and long stints of boots on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq? Why the Military Industrial Complex did. War corporations who build software and hardware for drones, tracking beams for missiles, ammunition, and tank artillery shells tipped with Uranium 238. Looks like Ike was right. Trillions of dollars spent on war, especially when the Complex has a captive government like Uncle Sam with a well-oiled printing press at the Fed, and that ain’t chopped liver.

Sure, Uranium 238 is radioactive and a real problem. The US decision to use this radioactive isotope in warfare in the desert sands of Kuwait and later, Iraq had a way of spreading this radioactive material not just to the four corners of Kuwait and Iraq but to the neighboring region as well. Why did we use radioactive material to tip the large canon shells in the first place? Well, it is a heavier element than lead, and will penetrate steel much easier than other metals used in a tipped shell. The projectile will travel twice as far as conventional ones. Plutonium would do just as well as the Uranium, but the expense would be too great, and terrorists might get a wild idea to try to harvest enough of this isotope to make a suitcase bomb. Anyway, the U 238 has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, so what a wonderful legacy to leave the Iraqis with until the end of the world. An Alpha Radiation Emitter, U 238 decays by naturally ejecting Alpha Particles (2 Protons and 2 Neutrons) continuously from the mass of U 238. The tip of the shell penetrates the enemy armor, explodes, and burns all inside the tank alive. The U 238 is blown to a fine ash and scatters to the four winds where it settles upon the sand. There it picks up some Oxygen atoms (undergoes oxidation), becomes a compound (Uranium Oxide) and turns black. The next big sandstorm lifts the radioactive residue and sand into the air, and it is breathed by every creature that breathes on the planet, including man. Wherever the wind blows, particulates of the U 238 isotope lodge in the lungs. There it will continue to spit out Alpha Particles which will ionize healthy lung tissue and cause an alteration in the physiology of the aspirating animal, given a little time. Bottom line, most probably, lung cancer will be on the coroner’s report as the cause of death. And all the rabbits and unsuspecting camels will never know why their terminal years are so void of quality as they struggle to breathe as their lungs react to the U 238, the irradiation of cellular tissue, and of course the cancer.

Wow. Best cross Iraq off your vacation list. But what about the people, the Iraqis who live and breathe there every day of their lives? I wonder if the press will give new and multiple cases of cancer there much coverage. It is such a shameful admission to make that we caused it by our own stupid abuse of our responsibility to not hurt the innocent. But there are considerations. There are reputations to consider and of course probable class action lawsuits in the making against the US. And denials to make, ad infinitum. Makes you wonder if we would use the same armor-piercing shells if we were attacked and found ourselves in a tank battle with the Chinese Army in the Nevada dessert. Think Nevada real estate would tank in value even worse if the landscape were covered with a powdering of U 238? I bet the Casinos would not like it very much. You can bet that people would not go there anymore to pull the one-armed bandits.

Oh well, an opener pulling the curtain back on America’s cavalier use of radioactive materials in war is always an attention-getter. We have needlessly delivered countless nuclear dirty bombs to an unsuspecting country of innocent people. We have spread radioactive materials with a 4.5 billion year half-life so that human habitation will become limited and hazardous from here on out. What were we thinking? Or were we thinking at all?

One could criticize without much opposition. Bottom line, why employ Uranium-tipped shells to pierce enemy tank armor in the first place? Why not just set the enemy tanks on fire with Napalm, White Phosphorus, or other such means not associated with nuclear radiation or long term decontamination procedures required to restore the land to accommodate human habitation? Every time the wind blows and especially during sandstorms there will be no escape from the airborne radiation. Swell. Did the Pentagon fall and hit their head?

I mean it’s not like we didn’t have other superior weaponry such as aircraft with smart bombs, drones with hellfire missiles, Tomahawk Missiles, you know, the usual arsenal, right? You think that might be one of the reasons some countries overseas (including allies of the United States) might be interested in nabbing some of our leaders for war crimes if they ever set foot on the wrong soil. Like Spain or Italy, perhaps?

Speaking of an uncaring attitude coming from the USA how about them mercenary Blackwater contractors that shot up Iraqi civilians perhaps just for fun and target practice? And no punishment provisions for their transgressions got much of a ho-hum from the American press or American people. And the U.S. courts whitewashed it all to make it look like it was not the Blackwater mercenaries fault. Yet videos sometimes tell a lot about the nature of a man or the organization he works for.

Lordy, what would John Wayne say to that? US judges dismissing charges and all, made Blackwater seem bulletproof and protected from the very seat of our government. Paid over 5 times as much as an uniformed soldier of the United States, Blackwater guns for hire were worth the $1 Billion Uncle Sam paid its founder and owner Erik Prince, right? Not. But our Constitution says mercenaries may be hired to fight overseas wars with tight stipulations. They can be used for no longer than a 2-year period, and must be subject to other regulations and rules as defined by those who command these mercenary armies. To pay them 5 times the normal pay as real American soldiers is ludicrous. Because a military draft these days is politically incorrect, it should be disallowed for a president to fill in the gaps with hired mercenaries like Blackwater provides. Bush hired them and Obama has increased their numbers, only the organization no longer goes by the name of Blackwater.

To allow the president to hire at will militias answerable only to him is the stuff revolutions are made of. It, like nuclear-tipped artillery shells is totally unnecessary and wrong. And innocent people whether taxed for the increased cost of waging war or innocents shelled by unmonitored bullets from the guns of mercenaries is anything but humane. It is not befitting of a country who believes in freedom and fair dealing for all peoples. The Founding Fathers would shudder at the phoniness and attempted justification of it all. And the stench of depravity that goes with embracing such a practice that seeks to fool honest taxpayers into hurting innocent people. Isn’t that what bin Laden did to us on 911?